“Schuyler knew that one day it would come to this. That she would have to lose one to have the other one. That this game would have consequences.”

“If the girl could only have spoken to the other boys and girls, the ones that had followed the golden-eyed boy before her, she would have known that there is always something left to lose.”

“She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.”

“I would not have dreamed back then, could never have imagined, that one day I would be a childless mother too.”

“If one knew, he wondered, the facts,would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?”

“Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.”